Design a PC/Server for ROON and HQ Player

[Miska]

CPU: Xeon or i7? Which one? Which model? Needs to be less than 95 watts.

 

The new Skylake i7-6700K gives plenty of processing power at 95W TDP.

 

MOBO?

 

Something with 10x series chipset is needed. For example Gigabyte's UD-series (UltraDurable) or ASUS TUF 24/7 -series.

 

RAM: 16Gb What brand and type? Is ECC needed?

 

For the Skylake, suitable DDR4. I prefer Kingston and Crucial.

[Miska]

Miska, what case do you use that equipment in?

 

I have not decided yet for a new machine. Old machine's case is something from Antec's line.

 

For new MoBo I was planning to use ASUS Sabertooth Z170 Mark 1.

 

For PSU I was thinking the fanless Seasonic too.

[Miska]

Thanks Miska. So you'd recommend updating my server PC or building a new PC to be the control or audio PC?

 

In HQPlayer context I'm not sure about what you mean by control PC. I'm just talking about the PC for running HQPlayer.

[Miska]

Yes, ASUS Sabertooth Z170 Mark 1, is well worth a thought. The only thing, which I find disturbing are the two little MB fans, as part of the sabertooth cooling concept. I assume, one can leave these disconnected... but then one has probably less heat to fight with another MB.

 

That's what worries me too, I hope those have active speed control and don't end up running much in this kind of use case. I didn't find any other board that would have as good quality capacitors, etc.

 

There's Trooper B150, but caps are cheaper and it only supports DDR3 RAM.

 

Gigabyte has three more interesting boards otherwise similar to the Sabertooth, but I have not found those available here (at least yet):

GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket 1151 - GA-Z170X-UD5 TH (rev. 1.0)

GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket 1151 - GA-Z170X-UD5 (rev. 1.0)

GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket 1151 - GA-Z170X-UD3 (rev. 1.0)

First one of these has Thunderbolt 3 too, which I find interesting and would really like to have.

[Miska]

These are my current ingredients for Win10 machine:

 

Current CPU is i5-6600T, but I may later change it to i7-6700T or 6700K when it becomes reasonably available. RAM is 32 GB of Kingston DDR4-2133 Fury HyperX (CL14) (4x DIMMs). NVIDIA Quadro M4000 graphics card for offloading is coming later.

[Miska]

What model number is the Samsung 850 Pro SSD in your picture?

 

Not sure, but I think it is MZ-7KE512BW

 

I planned on purchasing the Gigabyte Z170X-UD5TH mobo, and I wasn't sure which version was suitable.

 

Not sure what you are asking, the SSD is normal 2.5" 512 GB SATA device, so nothing much to worry in terms of compatibility (except TRIM functionality maybe). But if you are thinking about M.2 cards, then I'm not sure, there are some documents:

http://download.gigabyte.eu/FileList/Document/mb_m.2_support_100series.pdf

http://download.gigabyte.eu/FileList/SSD/mb_ssd_support_100series.pdf

http://download.gigabyte.eu/FileList/Document/mb_sata_express_100.pdf

[Miska]

If Roon comes out with RoonServer on Linux, would it make sense to build a RoonServer/HQPlayer box? Can HQPlayer be run without a GUI on ArchLinux?

 

HQPlayer Desktop has GUI always and cannot be run without it.

 

HQPlayer Embedded doesn't have any GUI, but it has different control API (MPRIS) and is usually used together with Rygel to implement a UPnP Media Renderer. If RoonServer Linux version would utilize this API, it would be possible to use the two together.

 

Currently supported OS for HQPlayer Embedded are Ubuntu LTS and Debian Stretch.

[Miska]

I see a VERY short "quick start guide" on the website which covers the bare bones usage of the HQ Player program but is there any guides available on the 100+ steps that are needed to take place before one attempts to use the HQ Player software? Something that covers how one gets to that point?

 

I'm not really sure at what detail level the documentation should be? There's manual PDF and the quick start guide from my side. But this assumes that one knows how to install an application on the platform they use so that they get the application started. Once it is running, the various aspects are explained in the manual.

 

Geoff of Sound Galleries has written a nice HQPlayer Kick-Start Guide, would that better answer to what you are looking for?

HQPlayer | soundgalleries

[Miska]

In terms of what kind of detail I think the documentation for HQ Player should have (IMO) it would be something similar to what is found in the link below

 

I would love to have such manual for Windows 10, Apple products and Android devices. But there's nothing at all!

 

Granted, I wouldn't expect 230+ pages in the case of HQ Player but if the same format was followed as seen in the .pdf but the content was substituted for HQ Player content I think we would be off and running.

 

The manual is at the moment 38 pages. I'm trying to improve it on areas where I perceive need for improvements. Do you have some example of manual for some other competing music player application that you consider good, and what are the things in it that are good which my manual is lacking?

 

It is also not unusual for people to ignore manuals completely, and for 230+ pages it easily turns into mode "too long - didn't read".

 

As an added bonus to documentation similar to above, I think it would be great to have someone like yourself provide what you would consider "The Ideal Build", in detail, for a Linux based system and a Windows based system using the HQ Player product.

 

There is no such thing as ideal system for everyone, there are so different needs. Someone wants to run 4-way digital cross-overs with digital room correction and DSD256 upsampling, while someone else just needs upsampling to 192 kHz stereo PCM. And my hope is that people could use the computers they already have.

 

Another problem is that hardware is constantly developing and changing, I don't have time to keep such hardware recipes fresh. On this thread I just posted what I selected for my new Win10 desktop that I needed and I'm happy with that machine.

[Miska]

I get that the the HQ player is installed on a heavy lifting primary desktop but there is nothing that talks about the NAA hardware or what to do in terms of its software setup.

 

I consider NAA installation an advanced topic left for users who are happy to tinker and experiment with their computers. For others, there are devices on the market that have NAA functionality built-in (from exaSound, Sonore and SOtM).

 

At one point I created a step-by-step screenshot series of example NAA setup, but it is now badly outdated (from Sep 2014)...

 

For certain pieces of hardware I've provided easy to use ready-made images. I could probably expand this set a bit to MinnowBoard MAX and Intel Galileo. But generic "any PC" is better left to Debian-based installs to handle the mess with all the drivers for possible hardware configurations.

 

I see mention of a "Daemon" but that terminology doesn't fall into line with NAA. Is the daemon the NAA component?

 

Yes...

 

Does one simply install any flavor of Linux found on the web on the NAA, then download the drivers for the libsound2 component, then install the daemon on top of it all?

 

Yes...

 

On Windows and Mac OS X, it is very easy, you unzip the package and run the provided executable and you are done.

 

If so, why not say that? Why leave anything to the imagination?

 

Because I thought that it is obvious... Just like what to do when you get an application as DMG package for Mac or .exe installer for Windows. Hardware and software requirements are stated on the web page.

 

I've already got a lightweight ALIX 2D2 piece of hardware with Voyage Linux on it. I suspect this is enough to get things rolling but personally it's not worth the effort to blow away an already perfectly working Voyage Linux setup on a gamble with HQ Player if I need to guess if my current equipment will work or not.

 

It should, although the networkaudiod package for 32-bit x86 is left at Jessie level older release at the moment. I'll try to find time to update it to most recent version, but I need to install Debian Stretch on a virtual machine first, or the multi-lib build environment on my 64-bit platform.

 

In any case, NAA doesn't need much space, so for Alix you don't need to touch your existing OS installation, just create a new flash card with the NAA installation. For others using more typical PC's, one can install the OS and networkaudiod on a USB memory stick for experimentation and use.

[Miska]

For processing PCM to DSD is processor speed or the amount of cache more important ?

 

Both... And in addition also RAM bandwidth.

[Miska]

Looking back at Miska's parts list I see one medium size SSD, is this for both the OS and the music library? Does HQ Player care if its on a smaller OS SSD pulling music from a separate internal music drive? Or should I save my money and buy a single large drive to hold everything?

 

It is just for the OS and software. Content is on a network share...

 

HQPlayer doesn't care about location of the files as long as the files are accessible as a filesystem. It can also show a combined view of content that is scattered over on different storages.

[Miska]

Thanks Miska, so SSD for OS and HQPlayer with a separate internal large spinning HDD for content is fine? I'd rather not have to buy a large SSD for conent if I don't have to, prices are still high.

 

Yes, that's fine. I have also added older 1 TB WD Green drive (I guess Blue is closest to that in their current lineup) on the machine where I hold some (non-music) files. When not in use it spins down. But anyway all the music content could be as well there.

 

For music storage, I would go with something like WD Red Pro or Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD (these two are equivalent products).

[Miska]

If one uses NAA and relocates HQPlayer machine outside of listening room and uses for example Roon as front-end, then fan noise is not an issue at all.

 

I referred to my hardware choices above, and in the blog post regarding GPU. In some cases depending on processing needs, GPU can help keeping fan noise low while increasing total available processing power.

 

Some of the algorithms benefit from GPU capabilities while some others benefit from CPU capabilities. Combining the two allows using strengths of both. Practically using GPU offload allows choosing CPU with fewer cores but higher clock speed.

 

But the specific preferences for one way or the other depends on a particular setup. GPU is especially useful for multichannel playback combined with room correction or digital cross-overs (lot of output channels).

[Miska]

As I look at the power draw and heat provided by an i7 6700k, a Mellanox or Intel fiber card, and maybe a GPU card....I'm beginning to see the wisdom of Jussi's design, with larger (and cheaper) case and cooling fans. An NAA puts the HQP machine in the home office. But do I need multiple PCIe slots for fiber card and NVidia? I don't see any of these mobos (Jussi's or Andrew's) providing them, but maybe I'm looking at the wrong spec.

 

Yes, you'll need number of slots. This is the board I'm using:

GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket 1151 - GA-Z170X-UD5 TH (rev. 1.0)

 

It has one PCIe 16x, one PCIe 8x, one PCIe 4x and three PCIe 1x slots. So total six PCIe slots. Typical graphics card, like the GTX 980 I have, will consume two slots, so one PCIe 1x becomes unavailable due to that. HQPlayer doesn't yet support multiple GPUs in SLI configuration, but I may add that support later.

 

Plus if you want blazingly fast boot, it has M.2 SSD card slot. It also has USB-C 3.1 / Thunderbolt 3 connectors and all the other latest bells and whistles...

[Miska]

Thanks Jussi. Did you think at all about including a dc-dc pico and linear external ps instead of a rather standard Seasonic internal ps? I ask even though my current server has died and it might have to do with the dc-dc pico, dunno. My mobo won't boot...oh well. Gonna build this new server and want the last details ironed out. Thx

 

No, I'm not convinced that it would have any benefits since DC-DC and SMPS are technically equivalent. The graphics card alone consumes peak 165W and takes power in using two 6-pin power cables. The Seasonic PSU can give out 20A current on +3.3V and +5V rails and 43A on +12V rail, comes with 7 years warranty and 150000 hour MTBF. For dual graphics card setup and bigger CPU, the machine would need bigger PSU than the 520W silent Seasonic, something like this:

X-1250 - Sea Sonic

[Miska]

Is HQPlayer still CPU bound whilst setting up for upsampling, i.e. a more powerful GPU wouldn't reduce cold startup times?

 

Yes, the initialization supports multi-core CPUs, but doesn't support GPU offload yet. That is still on my TODO-list...

 

I just did some further optimizations for initialization of the convolution engine.

[Miska]

That damn Quadro M4000 of yours is a $900 card! Yikes.

 

Isn't that still cheap compared to most high-end audio electronics? And it has at least billion times more transistors than most audio electronics! ;D

 

I decided to go with GeForce GTX 980 for the Win10 machine because people were asking for less expensive alternative. See here:

Upgrade GPU for more CUDA processing power - Blogs - Computer Audiophile

 

I use Quadro on my Xeon Linux-workstation.

 

What do you think is an inexpensive card that will help me when CUDA offloading multichannel? Also, I am going i7 6700k, a GPU card maybe like this https://pcpartpicker.com/part/evga-video-card-04gp41962kr

and a fiber card. You think 520w is still fine? PCpartspicker has me at 314W before the fiber card.

 

Depends on what you want to do exactly. For multichannel you'll need quite a bit of processing power and RAM on the card. GTX 960 is probably minimum for that kind of work (about 50% of speed of GTX 980).

 

520W should be fine for it, nVidia recommends 400W when used with 3.2 GHz i7:

GeForce GTX 960 | Specifications | GeForce

 

I chose the card based on quiet operation, so it has large heatsink with two slowly rotating fans to keep acoustics down. And the GTX980 model just fits in the case and 520W. The case can accommodate full length cards by removing one block of 3.5" drive bays, but putting bigger PSU would mean having a PSU with cooling fan.

[Miska]

I would like to know does CUDA will support GTX970m with 3G memory.

 

All the 900-series should be fine at varying amounts of processing power.

 

Soon nVidia should be launching a new 1000-series based on their Pascal architecture that should give a huge performance boost for HQPlayer (64-bit double precision floating point). There's some more info here.

[Miska]

So with that said. Does AMD totally out of the picture for the DFP method?

 

No, it only depends when their GPUs are programmable in some suitable way. OpenCL is not among the suitable methods.

[Miska]

If the focus is on audio processing, is there any reason not to go in the direction of one of these: NVIDIA Tesla K40C 12GB Computational Accelerator (NVIDIA Tesla K40C 12GB Computational Accelerator(753960-B21)| Hewlett Packard Enterprise® ) rather than a new graphics card?

 

No, just price and generation. K40C is a bit older Kepler-generation and current equivalent is Maxwell-generation M40. nVidia just released a new top of the line Tesla P100 with their newest Pascal architecture product. But there is no information yet on when P40 product would materialize...

 

The launch presentation gives some kind of picture:

[Miska]

RAM Question:

 

For loading in 32 GB of RAM, is it better to use 4x8 or 2x16?

 

For best performance it is best to have all memory channels in use. So check what kind of memory bank designations your system has.

[Miska]

I would imagine DDR3L Ram on Skylake processors would lead to a further improvment.

 

Skylake is intended for DDR4. Look out for lowest possible CL (CAS latency) to maximize memory speed.

 

I'm got Kingston HyperX FURY kit of 4 DIMMs:

FURY DDR4 Memory | HyperX

 

For even higher clock speeds they have the Predator series:

HyperX Predator DDR4 Memory for Intel X99 Motherboards

[Miska]

I'm looking at the Kingston Savage with a CL of 12.

 

HX424C12SB2K

 

But, it takes 1.35V vs 1.2 for the Fury. I can get it in the US for only US$10 more than Fury. Any downside other than voltage and heat? Maybe lifetime?

 

Looks good to me, the Fury is CL14 so if you get CL12 and higher clock speed, then it should be quite a bit faster.

 

Lifetime shouldn't be affected as long as there's sufficient cooling.

[Miska]

Ultimately, this begs the question of where exactly the noise is getting into the data stream in the first place.

 

Noise is injected to the analog signal at the point where D/A conversion is made. Thus the equipment surrounding / directly connected to the DAC is critical. And of course the DAC itself plays major role on keeping the signal clean.

 

When you use NAA, HQPlayer is isolated behind the network. A bit like for example Tidal's CDN (Content Delivery Network) servers. In fact, theoretically HQPlayer could be run as a cloud service, running in a datacenter somewhere at the other side of the globe. Similarly, you can run an optical network link between the two, just like there are across the oceans linking the continents.